Eyes On El Chete – No Wood Is Safe!

An Initial Look at the TOPS Knives El Chete

Ryan Houtekamer

The line between choppers, meat cleavers and machetes has been blurred before; now it’s happened again, and we like it. A TOPS KnivesEl Chete recently arrive at Breach-Bang-Clear’s sincerely polite and waffle-loving Canadian TOC, and we can confidently say that no wood is safe from us!

That’s what she said.

The design of the El Chete is very much based on a chopper style knife, but it’s bigger. That mass combined with the blade makes it perform like a vorpal dire beaver gnashing through trees.

Shout out to some fellow nerds there.

In any case, we wanted to give you a heads up on this high end machete while we do some more field trials. In the meantime here are a couple of pretty pictures and a bit about the knife from the maker.

You can see on this picture from TOPS the two different belt mounting styles in use

How does TOPS define destruction? El Chete.

This blade was designed with one thought in mind… chopping. With a 1/4″ thick blade that is a full foot long, it will do that very well. Even though it’s so large, the knife still weighs in under 2 pounds.

El Chete is the first TOPS knife to be released with our wicked new finish called Acid Rain. Because of the process we use, the finish varies slightly from knife to knife so that each person gets something unique. We wanted the handles to be thick enough to fill each user’s hand like a hatchet or small ax handle would, so we decided to use sandwiched Micarta. It’s well rounded for comfort and the black canvas Micarta underneath the green canvas Micarta adds even more to the aesthetics of this piece.

The sheath is an out-the-front design with all the bells and whistles. You just pull up slightly then out the front so that you don’t have to strain to pull the knife all the way up through the sheath. There is a strap that when snapped into place, helps immensely with the retention of the blade. We’ve also made it available with our rotating spring steel clip or a leather dangler attachment so that each user picks the right fit for him or her.

If you’re in the market for a large knife, you’ve definitely found it.

If you cant wait for us to write a review on this machete (and hint we really like it so far so just buy it) you can get one yourself right here. Otherwise wait out a bit and we will have all the details after we lay into all wood in our path. And maybe a moose.

Bill The Butcher from Gangs of New York would have loved this thing.

Sorry.

RH

This article made possible in part by B5 Systems (@b5systems), a member of JTF Awesome.

Contingency: Exercise your inner perv with us on Tumblr here, follow us on Twitter here or connect on Google + here.Emergency: Activate firefly, deploy green (or brown) star cluster, get your wank sock out of your ruck and stand by ’til we come get you.

T&C: All original material published by Breach-Bang-Clear is the copywritten property of Breach-Bang-Clear, Inc. If you wish to repost, republish, or otherwise share our content, feel free to reproduce an extract of up to 225 words and one complete, unaltered image, preceded by attribution crediting the source and author’s name, to include a link to the Breach-Bang-Clear home page, with a link back to the full article on our website, BreachBangClear.com. You do not require our permission to do this. Please do not reproduce our content in its entirety without contacting us first. We do allow full syndication on a case by case basis (credited, and posted with a canonical link, as is common practice and in good form) but only when mutually agreed upon beforehand. If you wish to reproduce a complete article, please contact us for permission to publish first.

Aboot the Author: What can we say aboot Ryan Houtekamer? Well, he was a cannon cocker in the Army for a while, then moved on to some sort of metal-bending aircraft structural engineering type billet in the Canadian Air Force. He’s a keen outdoorsman, spelunker, and fisherman who loves to tinker with all the things. Houtekamer is Breach-Bang-Clear’s northernmost Minion; he actually lives where it costs us extra to ship stuff to ‘cuz if has to go by dogsled part of the way.

True story.

Houtekamer actually enjoys cold weather, and revels in bombogenesis. Come to think of it, he’d fill a pretty good supporting role in a Jack London story. You can follow him on Instagram, @2centtac if you like (his tag is not, as you might expect, @Rhinopithecus bieti Canadius giganticus); there you will discover that he’s not just gear-curious, he’s a nerd too.